1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an object authentication technique for authenticating an object in an image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some recent image capturing apparatuses such as a digital camera have a function of authenticating a specific object, such as a face detection function or face authentication function. The face detection function is a function of recognizing the face region of a person in a captured image. The face detection function is applied to, for example, determination of whether objects include a person, and a function of automatically focusing a person. The face detection function is used as an auxiliary means for comfortable shooting by the user. The face authentication function is a function of identifying a person by a face authentication module by extracting feature amount data of a person's face detected by the face detection function and comparing the extracted feature amount data with feature amount data of a person registered in advance. The face authentication function is applied to, for example, arrange and search for image data after shooting.
As an application technique of these functions, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-073108 has disclosed a technique of exchanging a face dictionary between a plurality of apparatuses to share face feature amount data.
However, even when the face dictionary can be shared between apparatuses as in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-073108, if the formats of face feature amount data used by the respective face authentication modules of the receiving and transmitting apparatuses are different, received data cannot be used for face authentication. Also, if the type of face authentication function, for example, the face authentication module differs between the receiving and transmitting apparatuses, face feature amount data corresponding to the different face authentication modules need to be re-generated.